With 2026 winding down and 2027 uncomfortably close, I'm announcing a brief planned hiatus for Nature's Corrupted. Yes, a planned hiatus for once, and not just a random gap in writing while I flail about and feel sad about life. Feeling sad about life is something I'm known for, but it doesn't always make for a consistent writing schedule. November felt like the right time to go quiet, what with the holidays coming up and the general year-end business that typically gets between me and putting my newsletter out in a timely manner.

More importantly, I've decided to change how I do things around here. For good reasons and not the flailing around kind. But before we get into that, I'm going to take a step back and talk about what Nature's Corrupted even is and what it has been.

How did we get here?

I've been keeping a newsletter off and on for about a decade now. It was initially a small weekly release on the late TinyLetter, back when TinyLetter was a thing. The name escapes me now, but it was kind of a personal blog where I talked about whatever caught my attention. I discussed my writing, my life, comics, movies, and the like. This was pretty soon after my short-lived and frankly kind of embarrassing comics podcast, creatively titled Comics Squared with Magen Cubed. I ended up with a few reviews and articles under my belt as well, published at various now-defunct outlets, because comics and pop culture were very much my deal in those days.

This was also back when I first got serious about self-publishing, following a handful of ill-advised jaunts into the indie press world. My first two novels, one horror and the next superhero fiction, landed with resounding thuds. I made the move into horror-themed erotic romance for the fun of it. A few short stories later and I was still flirting with finding an agent and submitting manuscripts to editors, but nothing much came of that, either. My newsletter reflected a time when I was much more concerned with publishing and my place within that world, however tangentially I was ever in it to begin with.

Later, I moved to MailChimp after they gobbled up and shut down TinyLetter. I don't remember much of that time in my newsletter's life. Nobody really opened any of my emails, because they were apparently filtered as sales promotions, so I don't think anybody else does, either. At some point, I'm pretty sure I gave up, set up a blog at my old (now dead) website, and put up semi-regular comic book reviews and personal writing there. My first foray into proper essay writing happened there with a few very dated, potentially bad pieces I wrote about NBC Hannibal. It wasn't good work, but it was honest work, you know? I believed in the work.

Then Patreon came along when I was working on my book and short story series Southern Gothic. This would have been 2018 or so. I had also just relocated from Texas to Florida to live with my girlfriend, now wife, Melissa. Having quit my job and thrown my entire life into the back of a Jeep to live in a new town, I was on the hunt for stable work. Hijinks ensued, as those who know the lore are well-aware, but I'm nothing if not determined.

The money that I made from my self-published writing and supplemental Patreon content helped pay bills until I landed on my feet. As such, I moved my personal blogging and thoughts on writing behind a paywall to try and maximize what patrons were getting for their money. Writing scared isn't conducive to having a great relationship with your work, but that never stopped me before. The kind of personal reflection that I used my newsletter or blog for in the past fell by the wayside as fiction made a bit of extra cash.

Eventually, I got burned out from the churn of writing for the public and patrons at the same time. Surprising to no one but me, apparently. I closed the Patreon indefinitely to focus on fiction. But somewhere along the way, I got bored. Well, bored, and I still had new writing to promote. So I ended up on Substack and restarted my newsletter as Notes on Monstrosity, a nod to the horror-themed and horror-adjacent stories I was still writing. And I think it finally started working out.

Notes on Monstrosity became my playground to talk about whatever I wanted. Television. Comics and manga. Writing. Movies. Music. Video games. Anime. I wrote what I consider my first real, proper, decently-written essay, a personal retrospective on The Umbrella Academy comics and Netflix series. Then other, bigger essays followed. Even more personal writing. Even more in-depth research and analysis. Exhausting writing, like expelling demons onto the page, getting the thoughts out so they could live outside of me.

Whatever I wanted to say, it could live there. My writing started to pick up steam, too, getting shared and commented on outside of my usual circle of readers. It felt like I was starting to do something worthwhile, not just slapping at a keyboard in my spare time when I was supposed to be working on fiction. I ended up collecting over 1,100 subscribers, which is still surreal to consider even now.

Yeah, some are spam, some forgot that they subscribed. I know. It happens. But 1,100 is still a lot. That number seems small in internet terms when thinking about the sizes of platforms and follower counts. When I imagine a room full of 1,100 people -- living, breathing people, all existing in a shared physical space -- it puts the whole thing into perspective.

And then I left Substack over the, uh, fascism they supported? It was a bad time. So I migrated to Buttondown and changed the name to Nature's Corrupted. That's what you're reading now. Thanks for sticking around if you have. If not, thanks for coming along for the ride when you did. I hope you stay for what comes next.

What does it even mean?

Nature's Corrupted comes from the Gorillaz song Rhinestone Eyes from their 2010 album Plastic Beach. It's my favorite song of theirs, off my favorite album of theirs, for how perfectly it has captured my climate grief for the last sixteen years. I can't say my love for Gorillaz has weathered the now two decades that I've been listening to them. But watching the coast of Florida recede as the summers grow hotter, the sun pouring down on my brow in streams of bleach that burn the skin, it only feels truer.

Helicopters fly over the beach

Same time everyday, same routine

Clear target in summer when skies are blue

It's part of the noise when winter comes

It reverberates in my lungs

Nature’s corrupted in factories far away

I've seen the lyrics cited as both Natures corrupted and Nature's corrupted. Either way, the image of nature being corrupted by the blackening creep of industry sticks with me. Natures, too, not just the land itself but the essential humanity of those of us eaten up by that creep.

To me, the phrase Nature's Corrupted captures the complexity of navigating our moment in time. It's also a phrase I've used to title different online journals over the years, from my days hand-coding LiveJournal layouts in HTML to building simple blogs in CSS. I find that it speaks to my grief about the world as it is and my journeys through digital spaces to make sense of it.

It just feels…honest.

At the end of the day, that's what I want my writing to be. An honest interaction between myself and the world through the art that I experience. Art and fiction are the frameworks with which I contextualize a lot of my life. To paraphrase Joan Didion, I don't know what I think or feel -- about life, art, or myself -- until I write it down.

And I want to keep writing.

I need to keep writing.

To keep sharing. To document the times and spaces I move through if only to prove to myself that it matters.

Which brings us up to 2027.

Looking to the future

Let me start off by saying that this update is mostly conceptual. There's a great chance people won't even notice a difference in how I produce and publish this newsletter. That would be the best case scenario, honestly. Part of what I want to establish and maintain is a sense of continuity.

Nature's Corrupted is going to become something more akin to a magazine, because I'm thinking of it more in terms of published writing. Each month, I'm going to release a new issue. This issue will consist of segments:

Intro: A short personal essay (along with an appropriate musical accompaniment) to catch us up and introduce the overall topic/theme.

Close Reading: The main essay, on whatever I want to discuss that month. Three short films that have been keeping me up at night? How Chainsaw Man depicts primal human fears through Devils? Why I think Silent Hill 4: The Room is a Minotaur story? This is where it goes.

Input/Output: A little write-up on a piece or pieces that I've been wanting to talk about. Maybe I want to burn a few paragraphs on Yara Asmar's glitch art? Or a song I really like? Or an illustration that goes hard? That goes here.

The Hot Take: If I just have to get something off my chest but I don't want to do an essay about it, it goes here. Consider this a place to loosely explore ideas that don't fit anywhere else and I don't want to just spit out on social media.

Extracurriculars: If there's an article, review, or YouTube video essay that dovetails into whatever I've been talking about, it goes here. Consider these additional sources, citations, and recommendations.

And if I have a big essay or project to publish that month, then that's the main focus of the issue. Think of it as a double-sized special edition.

Okay, so. Why?

I want to talk about more art. I want to pull in more individual works that don't necessarily have a whole essay of stuff to talk about -- with a thesis and an argument -- and highlight them. I want to let myself write exactly what I need to write about any given work, be it a manga or a short film or a sprawling digital horror project, without getting hung up on how to frame it. Where to place it in a broader essay. Where it sits on a round-up of other works.

I don't want Nature's Corrupted to be a place where I just push myself to publish longer, more labor-intensive essays. Sometimes I'm going to become obsessed with something, write 5,000 words in a fugue state, and fire it off like a bat out of Hell. Sometimes I'm going to spend weeks or months diligently crafting a piece of personal writing the way one casts out a spirit. But sometimes I just want to write until I figure out what I think and how I feel.

Most of all, I want all of you to come with me for that process. 2027 is the year I plan to push hard and grow my readership. It would be great to have 2,000 subscribers by this time next year. I really want to try and make that happen. I want this to be a place where people can come to experience something new and find different ways to think about art and fiction.

A small garden, perhaps a quiet library, perhaps neither, but always a place for thinking and feeling.

I hope I see you there.

Before You Go

Thank you for reading. If you like what I do here at Nature's Corrupted, you can now join my tip jar tier at Ko-Fi.com for just $2.

Can’t do that right now? That's cool. Likes and shares are greatly appreciated and help me out a lot. 💜